Last night, I was working on my arrangement of Come, Ye Thankful People, Come, which (now that it is finished) is a candidate for a choral performance at the St Clement’s Harvest Service on 6 October.

My method for developing these arrangements is to construct and test them using keyboard sounds in my DAW, Logic. Once I’ve got the notes sounding right, I then turn to Lilypond to create a score – I’ve now got enough Lilypond-fu that I was able to knock up a two part score with lyrics for each part and some dynamics, neatly fitting on a couple of pages.

To finish off, I decided to try singing the two parts (one scrapes the top of my range and the other goes down toward the bottom of it) and recording that as a demo. It isn’t a particularly polished performance – if you listen to I’m Sorry, I Haven’t a Clue, think of Tim Brooke-Taylor and the late Jeremy Hardy doing a duet (no, I’m not putting it on public release in this form)! Still, with a bit of mixing magic (compression, doubling up of each part through auxillary busses and panning each of the resulting four parts through varying panning and levels of the reverb bus to give them some separation), it should do the job to demonstrate what I have in mind to the conductor and pianist.